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Thursday morning Keynote: Educations vs Training

Selena Deckelmann (@selenamarie) gave the Thursday keynote address at LISA this morning. Her topic: Educations vs Training. We’ve had a Workshop on this earlier, and a BoF session last night so we’ve been talking about it all week.Unfortunately, we’ve been talking about it here at LISA since 1997 and
the fundamentals of that talk haven’t changed. This is bad, and we need
to stop that and actually change how we’re talking about it. The
problem is only getting worse; the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts
that by 2018 there will be 1.5 million additional jobs in
computer-centric careers like ours, and we’re having trouble finding
decent workers right now.The
mindset we’re stuck in right now is that Education does not equal
Training. Education will teach you how design a wiring diagram, know how
to get at the management interfaces of networking gear, and similar.
Training tells you that talking down a specific network switch will
bring the HPC cluster down, or that HSRP routers won’t faillback a
Windows service because Windows won’t issue a Gratuitous-ARP packet
without a specific hotfix. Because of this, there is a wide suspicion
that degree programs at formal educational institutions are largely
pointless since they simply can’t handle the training aspect, and that is where most of systems administration domain knowledge resides.Selena
challenges this. The training and education domains actually overlap,
and overlap quite a lot. The overlap is where knowledge and skills are
centered. Education provides habits, training provides competency. It
all works together.Bloom’s Taxonomy
describes the orders of thinking. At the bottom is Remembering, rote
memorization, moving up through understanding, applying, analyzing,
evaluating, and finally at the apex: creation. Education is really good
at providing the first three steps, training is good at the top three.Selena has been working withPyLadies
to bring more women into the Python community. One of the ways they do
this is to provide basic programming training. The women coming to
Python probably didn’t have any programming courses, and may be missing
even more fundamental background knowledge like algebra (it’s hard to
grasp variables if you did badly in algebra). They’ve built their
educational process to handle all of this.They
start with the very basics, the functional stuff of how do you write
this at all (remembering and understanding). Then move into more complex
areas, like variables, loops, flow-control, and data-structures
(applying). Once these are mastered they write exercises (applying &
analyzing). Then they go through a section on debugging other people’s
code (evaluating).This
is a very hands on process and involves a few other techniques to keep
students engaged. There are defined outcomes. Instruction comes with
feedback loops for both the student and mentors. The whole process is
designed around collaboration, which further trains by modelling and
pairing. At the end students are able to read code, even code much more
complex than they could produce themselves.This
training model can be simplified to four characteristics: numbered
steps with measurable, defined outcomes; explicit instruction and
feedback loops; expectation for collaborating; pairing and modelling.
Selena’s model works, but we need more voices in the conversation.
Selena advocates picking constructive fights. There is not currently
enough discussion between educators and practitioners to share needs and
experiences. We need to discuss a few key questions: is it more
important to initially focus on ethics or on risk management? Is K-12
the best place to focus on education, or does it belong at the Master’s
level? How do we create a non-profit for supporting trusted
certifications?One
questioner has been doing a lot of this already, but it is very
expensive with a 2 or 3 to 1 student:teacher ratio. Universities can’t
scale to this. Selena pointed out that once professional educators get
involved this should improve. Questioner also suggested that getting
practitioners in to do a bit of mentoring it’ll help a lot as well.Another
questioner pointed out that current sysadmins come up through the
ranks and get diverse training along the way. This creates a very
diverse skill base. Would moving to a more formalized system reduce that
kind of diversity? Selena pointed out that by creating a formal system
that is a lot more approachable, and is recognized externally as valid, it’ll increase our overall diversity as a result.Another
questioner points out that the big problem is thinking, not technology.
An earlier questioner from NASA pointed out they have a good amount of
really old systems (WinNT! PDP11’s!) that are still in production for
very good reasons, and worried about getting talent in a more formalized
environment. This questioner made the point that per-organization
training is still going to be needed to cover the specific use-cases for
that organization; formally trained sysadmins will have the thinking
skills, they just need an update on the details of the new environment.There
are a lot of opinions on this, and they need to be brought forward to
disrupt, and hopefully improve, the conversation around making new
systems administrators.